someone holding my name.com
 

i recently found a hosting service that will allow me 1000 megs of webspace, and unlimited bandwidth. with like 900 pop e-mail accounts. since i do lots of travelling and work on computers as well, i thought it would be cool to register a domain name and pay for this hosting service. doing this allows me to have a universal storage location for files i may need when working on computers. at the same time, i have a large family, and handing out the e-mail addresses to these relatives with a familyname.com address would be pretty cool.

i am thinking to start up some family run networking business. to work around the costs of having to advertise my perspective business in the papers, i was told that i would have to use my name. but this would just be for advertising, and this is not the primary reason for it.

so i run a search on whois.net and find my name registered to someone in hawaii for familyname.com, so i try familyname.net, registered to the same person. each of which for at least 4 years or so. so i thought he would be kind enough to sell me one and i proceeded to call him. turns out he knows it's a popular name amongst chinese people and is hording it with the intention to sell parts of it as subdomains and e-mail addresses.

now i fully support capitalism, but this guy is hording my birth name to make money off my birth name, while i was going to eat the cost myself and hand it out to family members. is there something or someone i can contact regarding this matter? mind you that he has had these domain names registered for some time now, with nothing done. yet he won't let me use any of it.

thanks for helping.

nope... nothing you can do...

i at one time wanted to do the family domain thing.. then i realized i just don't want to have to deal with the whole family like that all over the world. I'll figure something out.. there's only a manufacturer who holds my familyname.com and I'm not interested in fighting them for it. I'd pick something else like familynameUSA.com or some other variant. He's had them far too long with no other challenges. Does he even hold .NAME as well? what about other places like .TV? or some other country with your initials? get creative...

I'm lucky that only two families in the entire USA have my last name., and one family is mine. I'm sure that somewhere down the line we're all the same damn family.

thats why botsko.net was easy to get.

If you fully supported capitalism you wouldn't mind :) !, but yeah theres nothing you can do about it, unless you trademarked your name somehow.

Add a hypen or use one of the other domain types, domain names typically work on first come, first served attitude unless its a trademark or such.

If you got really rich and famous you could sue him and appeal to the UN like Angelina Jolie and other people have.

But yah, I feel for you, just get creative and find something else...

HAHA Last time I checked Nsync had my family name registered. Damn boy bands

If you don't have a shitload of money, there is nothing you can do. All hail the judicial process.

damn. i think i'm gonna give him a call again to see if he's willing to sell me one of the two. thanks guys. in the meantime, any of u have any ideas? i'd really like to keep it as close to kwan as possible. kwan.com, kwan.net, etc, thanks.

How about re-writing it?

www.slant-eyes.com
www.slant_eyes.com
www.slantedeyes.com
www.fark.com